Playwright Tammy Ryan’s “Take My Hand and Wave Goodbye” had its first ANPF reading this past Saturday, and the audience was rapt—a story of gun violence and the damage done to those left behind, the play is packed with raw expressions of grief as well as moments of fine-tuned levity, making for an entirely engaging experience.

Ryan is a resident playwright of New Dramatists class of 2027. Her work has been performed across the United States and internationally at such theaters as The Alliance Theater, Florida Stage, Marin Theater Company, People’s Light and Theater Company, Pittsburgh Playhouse, Portland Stage Company, Premiere Stages, and Theatre Lab among others. Honors include the Francesca Primus Prize for Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods, and the American Alliance of Theater in Education’s Distinguished New Play Award for The Music Lesson. Other works include Molly’s Hammer (Repertory Theater of St. Louis), Tar Beach (Luna Stage), and Soldier’s Heart (Pittsburgh Playhouse). Take My Hand And Wave Goodbye received a Jerry A Tishman Creativity Fund Extended Workshop at New Dramatists and was further developed at Playfest, Orlando Shakes both directed by Jessi D. Hill. Ryan is grateful for the support she has received from the National New Play Network, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Heinz Endowments. She is currently at work on a commission for Thrown Stone Theater about American folk artist, Ammi Phillips.

Ryan is hard at work incorporating some changes to her work that came out of the audience talkback following her reading; we caught up with her during a break to chat about the process so far.

You’ve had a lot of experience with play development programs—how beneficial are they for the playwright?

Well, you know, once you start getting used to working this way, then you kind of can't go back to just to staying in your room all by yourself. I really value actor input at a very early stage. I get a lot out of just listening to actors read, and listening to them talk, listening to a director talk to them about the play, listening to their questions that they have. This group here at TheatreSquared, they have very good eyes. They catch everything, they have questions about everything. And so it's been it's been really beneficial. This is a collaborative art form.

Can you talk a little bit about how you first came to play writing? What drew you to the art form?

As a young girl I always wanted to be an actor. I don't know why I thought that, because I didn’t really do any acting. I didn't really have an exposure to theater, really. I grew up in New York and Queens, to a working-class family, and we didn't go to the theater. But my uncle was an actor in Manhattan, and that was this very sort of exotic, exciting escape, a bridge and tunnel away from Queens. And he encouraged my interest in in acting. Eventually, I went to college, and I studied theater at the SUNY Buffalo State University. It was a really wonderful theater program there. I didn't get cast a lot because I had a New York accent and a lisp, and I was very rough around the edges. So I was a little discouraged. And then another fellow student wrote a play herself, and she cast me in it. So I did this little workshop of her play. And I thought, well, she can write one, I can write one. So I did write this play, a two hander. And I showed it to my acting teacher, and a week later, I asked him if he'd read it, and he said, ‘Yes. And you better write the second act, because we're going to produce it.’ And he produced it in back of a bar and it ran for a month, and I made money. I paid my rent. I was like, whoa, okay. I got a lot more encouragement as a playwright than I ever got as an actor. And I thought, maybe I want to be a playwright. Eventually I went to Carnegie Mellon for my MFA in Dramatic Writing and have been pretty much writing plays since then. And I stopped acting. That was a good thing, because I had terrible stage fright, was probably not going to be a sustainable career for me. God bless actors, I love actors. I admire actors so much, and I don't know how they do it—just the vulnerability of how you have to expose yourself as an actor. I really value actors. I mean, I couldn't do what I do without actors. But acting really was not going to be the profession for me. I'd much prefer sitting in the back of the audience in the dark.

Talk about the evolution of this play.

The cast of “Take My Hand and Wave Goodbye” performing at the Momentary on Saturday, July 16, 2022.

[To write it] took me many years. I thought about it for a long time. I live with plays for a long time—some personal thing will happen, and then I’ll start to look out into the world and kind of collect pieces that will sort of maybe fit into the story and help me help me fictionalize what begins as like a personal exploration or journey. … I always look at what's going on in society, what's going on in the world. And of course, Sandy Hook happened. And I kind of resisted that for a little bit, because I really didn't want to write a social issue play about gun violence. But I had real grief after Sandy Hook—I think we all did. And then, of course, nothing changed, and what do you do with that? I think the personal grief that sparked the play kind of connected to this sort of community grief. When I was writing the first draft in 2018, the Tree of Life [Synagogue] massacre happened a walking distance from my house. My neighborhood is right next to that neighborhood. We all knew people connected to that—it was a community-wide thing. That's when I knew: Okay, you do have to write this. And it does have to be about gun violence. What I'm really interested in is the grief that it leaves behind. I'm really interested not in the shooter or gun laws or activism—I'm interested in the impact on the people left behind, and especially on kids. As a mom, I often write about larger questions through the lens of family. For me, it's really about: how do young people take this in? How do they grieve it? How do they find some grounding or resiliency to help them navigate this? And, you know, what impact is this having on our kids?

As a graduate of many other play development programs, is there anything that TheatreSquared does differently, or any benefits that you're finding here that are particularly beneficial for you?

Well, it's a beautiful setting. A gorgeous theater. And the design of the theater, the openness of the stairways going out into the sort of open areas and so many places to meet. Just the atmosphere of the place, it just feels so welcoming. It puts you in the mind of a laboratory, like this is a place where creative minds are going to come together, and we're going to talk and we're going to interact with each other, we're going to exchange ideas, and we're going to try things and experiment. And it just has this sort of process feeling about it, just the space, I would say. And then the collaborators all seem to be kind of focused on process, which most play development places say that that's what they're there for. But then there's always the presentation aspect of it, and some places are more concerned about that than others. Sometimes you're inviting an audience in to sort of judge these plays or to decide if they're going to get produced or not, and, here, I feel like that pressure is not being put on the work, which is great. I don't feel pressure about that. I don't feel stressed about that. And I like the reading in the middle, the tryout, just to see where you’re at. I did a lot of rewrites the first week. And then we heard it in front of an audience, and today we spent the day just responding, reflecting on that experience and any questions that the actors had left and talking with the director and dramaturg about all the questions that we have now, or, what's here? How is it working? What are the questions? And I feel like now I have all pf that input now, and all that feedback, and I'm going to sort it out and take tomorrow to write. And then, you know, then we'll start to kind of play a little bit with it and see what's there and then put it back together and hear it again a second time. I think that's really valuable. I'm curious about what people who saw the first reading, if they come back for the second reading, how they respond to that, because that'll give me a lot of information. It feels like a very full process.

Is there anything I didn’t ask that I should have, or anything else you would like to add?

I'm very grateful to TheatreSquared for bringing me here. This pandemic has been a hard time for theater artists. I think it's been a hard time for playwrights. The way the industry works, you get things in the works over a period of years, and the rug was just pulled out from under us. For me, everything kind of stopped. You wonder, how's it going to pick up again? Being invited here is just a gift that makes me feel like a playwright again. It seems to be coinciding with a lot of other things starting for me again—I have a commission that I'm going to get started on when I get back, and it feels like the before times, so I'm just really very grateful. It's always surprising where you find your tribe, where you feel like, oh, we are simpatico here. We get each other. You know, you get me and I get you. Something really special can happen here.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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Playwright Tammy Ryan's "Take My Hand and Wave Goodbye" examines grief, loss and the view from the other side